Why does a person recognize that another person is saying something wrong if they say it the exact same way . . . but they have different accents?
I met a woman last night named Carrie.
Because of her accent, when she says “Carrie” it sounds like “Kiri”.
[ul]
[li]Her: Hi, I’m Carrie. (sounding EXACTLY like “Kiri”)[/li][li]Me: Kiri? (sounding EXACTLY like “Kiri”)[/li][li]Her: No, it’s Carrie (sounding EXACTLY like “Kiri”)[/li][/ul]
Why does it sound wrong to her when I say it?
Why doesn’t she hear that I’m saying her name exactly how she says it?
I’m looking for “How the Brain Processes Language” type answers. But any other helpful information or anecdotes are welcome. I suppose the reason that I’m looking for technical brainy explanations is that on a practical level I do understand this: She knows her name is Carrie, she knows I’m saying “Kiri”, so she corrects me.
But, even though I understand it on a practical level, it still seems very strange to me. Two people vocalizing the exact same sounds with the exact same inflection, yet one recognizes that the other is wrong.
Bret is introducing himself. With his accent “Bret” sounds like “Brit”.
The woman he’s speaking to keeps repeating “Brit?” and he has to spell it out for her. Once he gets her to say “Bret” he confirms that she’s correct- but her “correct” pronunciation is more different from his pronunciation than any of her “incorrect” pronunciations.
Again, on a practical level I understand this. He knows his name is Bret and he knows she is saying “Brit”. Still, it seems a very strange phenomenon.
It’s about context. When you know someone has a different accent, you unconsciously map the sounds so that you understand them - to my English ears, a Texan saying ‘John’ sounds like (what I would write as) ‘Jaahn’.
If he makes an effort to say ‘John’ using English vowel sounds familiar to me, my brain is already converting them on the fly and I am likely to perceive him as saying “Jorn”
First of all, are you really sure you’re making the same sounds she is? When I was learning English (not my first language) I was perplexed by the strange and ways vowels are pronounced and the subtle differences between bad, bed, bat and bet, which we’d all pronounce the exact same way in Dutch. It takes some time to first hear the differences and then be able to reproduce them.
Another explanation is that the other person kind of subtracts your accent. So to you the other person has an accent that shifts every letter one position higher in the alphabet, and let’s assume you have a neutral accent. So if she says X you year Y but if you say X she knows you mean X even though if her brother makes the same sound she knows he’s saying W.
Little kids will do something similar. My daughter just turned 3, and the other day she pointed to the hospital as we drove by.
“Hopistal!” she said. (I just had a baby, so she knows it well.)
“You see the hopistal?” I mimicked.
“No, hopistal!” she corrected me.
“Hospital?” I said.
“Yes, that’s the hopistal.” So, she knew what it was supposed to sound like, but couldn’t quite get it correct at that time.
I suspect this is related. In the same way it sounds off if, say, an American English speaker over-enunciates the accent on a borrowed foreign word. There was, I believe, an SNL skit about this a while back, about the office workers going for “enchiladas” and “chiles rellenos” with exaggerated Spanish accents.
About 20 years ago I was having a beer in Germany with an Englishman who was fluent in German. The beer glass I was drinking from said “König.” I asked him the proper way to pronounce it. He said what sounded like (to my Texan ears) “koonig.”
So I repeated back: koo-nig
He said, no, koo-nig
Again I said koo-nig
We did this several times before he stopped me and explained it a different way.
The basic cause I think is that the ö sound doesn’t exist in my dialect, so when he said it, my brain automatically mapped it to the closest sound that I knew. I didn’t even realize it was occurring.
A very similar thing happened with you and this woman named Carrie.
I suspect the answer lies in vowel mergers. As an example, I have the cot-caught merger and it can be difficult if not impossible for me to detect when people are using ɔ instead of ɑ and vice-versa. It would be very possible for me to say Tom and someone from the NE would wonder why I insist on saying it oddly.
People don’t necessarily realize how their own accent sounds to others. They may pick up some subtle differences between what they are trying to say and the word you respond with:
Southern girl: Could you hand me that pin? (she means, pen, the thing you write with)
Me: What pin? (the thing you stick in something)
Southern girl: Not pin, PIN!
Also, the final sound is not a “g.” It’s kind of a breathy “h” type of sound, or, depending on the dialect, could be a “k” sound. It’s not a voiced “g,” though.
Basically, the sounds you can hear are conditionedb the sounds you can make. Hiberno-English (for example) is characterised by the use of sounds which are common in Irish, but which do not occur in most of the dialects of English that are used in England. Users of those dialects do not hear those sounds; they hear somewhat similar sounds that occur in their own dialect and, when they try to imitate an Irish accent, they employ those sounds. They genuinely do not hear any difference between what they are hearing and what they are saying, but the difference is very evident to the speaker of Hiberno-English.
And the same goes for many pairings of dialects. If the OP had asked Carrie from New Zealdand to repeat first “Kiri” and then her own name, the OP would likely have heard the same word twice. But Carrie would have heard two different words, and would have had no difficulty in distinguishing them if another New Zealand speaker has said one or other word.
Hearing seems like a mechanical thing, but it’s not.
I used to work in a recording studio and when I started, for the first few weeks, the engineers would be talking about differences in sounds that I simply couldn’t distinguish. They could hear differences in playbacks that I couldn’t. It took several weeks for me to become attuned to the subtle differences that seemed like glaring problems to the experienced engineers. It was absolutely a learning experience and I had to work at learning how to listen carefully.
You think that you and she were making the same sounds, but you weren’t and she is simply attuned to subtle but real differences that you are not.
In this case, however, the words “pen” and “pin” are exact homophones to the southerner.
I can’t think of any words with “en” that I would pronounce with the short-e sound, they all have the short-i sound. Pen, hen, then, when, enchilada, all have the exact same sound as “pin.”
And yet the “Southern girl” in Tripolar’s example obviously did pronounce the words differently, since otherwise she would have attempted her clarification in some other way (“no, the pin for writing with!”)
But my point was that the conversation couldn’t have happened the way he described it; that was his retelling of it but with him missing a key point. A southern girl would not have said " Not pin, PIN!" because she pronounces them exactly the same. She would have said “not a straight pin, but a writing pen!” and pronounced pen and pin exactly the same.
I think it’s not quite exactly that in all cases. The southern vowels sometimes get extended almost into two syllables. So ‘pen’ becomes sort ‘pi-in’ instead of just ‘pin’. My first name is Ed, and my friend named Ed from Mississippi draws that out until it’s clearly ‘Ay-ed’. Since this is common for them I think they pick that subtle difference up in the case of the girl I mentioned. Side note, I heard that Julia Roberts had to take speech lessons to get that effect out of her speech before she could land any important roles.
Here’s another (stupid) example of context and perception, based on a lame joke.
A person with a generic English accent saying “beer can” sounds like a person with a parody Jamaican accent saying “bacon” - try it with any of the UK voices on this online text to speech engine: http://www.oddcast.com/home/demos/tts/tts_example.php